The Story of Lucy Gault

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"The Story of Lucy Gault" - a beautiful, haunting novel by acclaimed writer William Trevor. "Astonishing, tender. A perfect novel". ("Sunday Telegraph"). It is shortlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize. "A masterwork. I doubt that I have read a book as moving in at least a decade. A homage to the redemptive power of love". ("Independent"). Summer, ...
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"The Story of Lucy Gault" - a beautiful, haunting novel by acclaimed writer William Trevor. "Astonishing, tender. A perfect novel". ("Sunday Telegraph"). It is shortlisted for the 2002 Booker Prize. "A masterwork. I doubt that I have read a book as moving in at least a decade. A homage to the redemptive power of love". ("Independent"). Summer, 1921. Eight-year-old Lucy Gault clings to the glens and woods above Lahardane - the home her family is being forced to abandon. She knows the Gaults are no longer welcome in Ireland and that danger threatens. Lucy, however, is headstrong and decides that somehow she must force her parents into staying. But the path she chooses ends in disaster. One chance event, unwanted and unexpected, will blight the lives of the Gaults for years to come and bind each of them in different ways to this one moment in time, to this wild stretch of coast..."Flawless. Guaranteed to keep you reading - all through the night if necessary - to find out what happens. Trevor's best novel". ("New Statesman"). "Dark, elegantly written ...a book to relish". ("Independent on Sunday"). Readers of "Love and Summer" and "Felicia's Journey" will adore "The Story of Lucy Gault". It will also be cherished by readers of Colm Toibin and William Boyd. William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. His books in Penguin are: "After Rain"; "A Bit on the Side"; "Bodily Secrets"; "Cheating at Canasta"; "The Children of Dynmouth"; "The Collected Stories" (Volumes One and Two); "Death in Summer"; "Felicia's Journey"; "Fools of Fortune"; "The Hill Bachelors"; "Love and Summer"; "The Mark-2 Wife"; "Selected Stories"; "The Story of Lucy Gault" and "Two Lives".
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly, 2002-08-05Trevor (Death in Summer) is one of the finest prose stylists writing today; his delicately shaded novels and stories often have a Chekhovian sense of loss and longing. This novel, with its elegiac tale of a quiet, sad life lived in the shadow of a wrecked childhood, could well have been penned by the Russian master. Lucy is nine years old when her father, a wealthy Irish army captain married to an Englishwoman, shoots at and wounds one of a trio of locals trying to set his Irish country house, Lahardane, afire in the 1920s. Captain Gault and his wife, Heloise, decide they must leave for England and safety, but Lucy, who has known no other home but Lahardane, flees into the woods on the eve of their departure and cannot be found. Eventually convinced she has drowned at a nearby beach, her parents leave for a life of wandering and grieving exile in Europe, utterly out of touch with their old life. Lucy, however, is discovered, starved but alive, days later by two faithful retainers, who with the aid of a family lawyer keep the house open as Lucy grows into womanhood. The possibility of love enters her life, but her passionate attachment to the remote place repels her potential suitor and she lives on alone. Eventually, after the death of her mother, her father returns to live with her for a while. She even gets to know the wounded youth who once tried to burn down the house, now an elderly man in a mental institution. Lucy ends her days at Lahardane, out of touch with the modern world, but still in thrall to the past. Trevor's deeply poetic sense of the Irish character and countryside, his magical evocation of the passing of time, have never been more eloquent. This is a book to be quietly cherished. (Sept. 30) Forecast: Admirers of the author will need no urging to seek this out, and widespread and positive review attention should help win new ones. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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